Intertextuality

Intertextuality is the shaping of a text’s meaning through its relationships with other texts, including quotation, allusion, imitation, and genre.

Allusion: An indirect reference to a person, event, work, or idea that depends on recognition. An allusion imports another text’s associations without quoting it directly.
Mikhail Bakhtin: A Russian philosopher and literary theorist whose work developed ideas of dialogism and heteroglossia. Bakhtin’s account of dialogic language helped establish the idea that utterances answer other utterances.
Intentional Fallacy: The error of treating an author’s intended meaning as the definitive standard for interpreting a literary work. Intertextual interpretation can exceed what an author consciously intended to borrow or evoke.
Ulysses: James Joyce’s 1922 novel that reworks Homer’s Odyssey through a day in Dublin. Its structure and characters gain meaning through sustained engagement with Homer’s epic.
The Death of the Author: Roland Barthes’s argument that a work’s meaning should not be fixed by its author’s biography or intention. Intertextuality supports Barthes’s shift from authorial origin to the text’s intersecting references.
Quotation: The reproduction of words from another source, usually marked as borrowed speech or writing. Quotation makes one text’s wording visibly present inside another.
Dialogism: The principle that language and meaning arise through interaction among voices and utterances. Dialogism supplied a model for understanding texts as engaged in ongoing exchange.
New Criticism: A twentieth-century approach that emphasizes close reading of a literary work as a self-contained verbal structure. New Criticism’s focus on textual unity differs from tracing a work’s relations to other texts.
The Waste Land: T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem assembled from quotations, allusions, and voices drawn from many sources. Its dense allusions make intertextual relations a visible part of the poem’s form.
Reader-Response Criticism: A critical approach that studies how readers participate in producing a work’s meaning. Recognizing textual echoes depends partly on what readers know and bring to interpretation.

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